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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25565491">Monsters</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Redisaid/pseuds/Redisaid'>Redisaid</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Warcraft - All Media Types, Warcraft III, World of Warcraft</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Actually in the Third War, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Gen, I just wanted to use that last tag so bad, Introspection, Major Character Undeath, Undead and sad about it forever, Vignette, stream of conciousness</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 09:02:54</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,527</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25565491</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Redisaid/pseuds/Redisaid</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>I have a lot of feelings about recently-undead Sylvanas during the Third War and in her rebellion. Here's some vignettes about it. </p><p>I'll be posting these occasionally as writing breaks from longer works.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>58</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Monsters</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>On today's menu of feelings, Sylvanas realizing that she has some free will for the first time after her death.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It started with a flick of her wrist. </p><p>Well, what qualified for a wrist these days. Like the rest of her, it was incorporeal, an illusion of flesh given shape against the darkness of these wretched remains of the world. It was attached to something like an arm, and something not at all like her once graceful hands. No, these were taloned, monstrous things.</p><p>And Sylvanas supposed that such a thought, too, was its own act of defiance. But her awareness of her torment had never ceased. It was merely her will to resist it that had.</p><p>But she caught herself, flicking her wrist as she often had in life. Once, it would result in the crack of bones, the tension of tendons released. An old injury had caused her to develop the habit. A fall from horseback, back when she was still in training, so, so long ago.</p><p>Memories too, were something rare, but not banished. Her captors, controllers, jailers even, had seemingly wanted her to understand that she was being punished. That this unnatural extension of her existence was meant to be a revolting mockery of the life she once lived.</p><p>And that bastard Arthas, he seemed to take particular enjoyment out of that, once he figured it out. Oh, how he tortured her. Mocked her. Going so far as to carry her corpse around, threatening to mutilate it, or stake it on the very minarets of Silvermoon, each spire proudly topped with a limb or a hunk of her flesh.</p><p>And she could do nothing. She couldn’t move. Only the Lich King’s will moved her. But she could wail. She could wail enough through closed lips for Arthas to tire of it and leave her be. For a little while. Days mattered little. The sun and the moon passed and cycled without notice. For what did it matter to her now? An elf abandoned by both Belore and Elune.</p><p>But she did it again. Her wrist flicked, hoping to ease a soreness it no longer had. Following muscle memory of muscles that lay lifeless now, in an iron coffin hitched to the back of one of the meat wagons. </p><p>Sylvanas looked at the offending part of her, moving without purpose, without an intent to kill and maim and rend in the name of the Scourge. Without the mechanical pull of senseless slaughter. Without the heavy shackles of the Lich King’s presence, a weight that fell on her from time to time, it’s iron grip the most physical thing she could experience anymore.</p><p>And she did it the third time. She moved, rolling her clawed spectral hand in a slow, circular motion. So familiar, yet so alien. So normal, but yet so significant. </p><p>“I grow restless of hunting down peasants in the woods.”</p><p>The words startled her in a way that was suddenly too visceral. She was suddenly too aware. Too present. </p><p>And the chill of the voice was not what she needed to interrupt such a realization. </p><p>“Patience, Prince Arthas,” Kel’thuzad counseled him. </p><p>They were walking up the line of troops. Well, not a line, and not walking, in Kel’thuzad’s case. Undead needed no formations, no tactics, no lines, no supplies. They won merely on numbers, and their ability to produce more of said numbers from their winning. No, this was merely a scattered array of idle monsters, waiting for the will of some awful god to bring them to their feet again.</p><p>“Why aren’t we meant to head south and destroy the rest of the kingdoms?” Arthas questioned. “There is no hope for those that still shelter in this cursed land. The very fields die as we walk through them. We should be conquering cities instead of chasing rats!”</p><p>“We must continue to obey the demons’ orders. The Lich King will reveal his plans to us when the time is right,” Kel’thuzad cautioned.</p><p>She heard such conversations often. Ever the spoiled brat he always had been, even now Arthas complained constantly and wanted for what he didn’t have. Soulless and wretched as he was, the shell of him that remained was still an ambitious and foolish boy.</p><p>Sylvanas chanced another act of defiance, tempting fate to see if she could lift her head and look up to see them. She could. She absolutely could. </p><p>A part of her expected those rigid shackles to fall on her then, to be noticed for all of the miracles she worked in those few moments. For the control she had of herself, of what remained. </p><p>But the Lich King never came. He didn’t turn her head away. He did muster her for battle. He didn’t rend her existence from this plane again, preferably to some quiet darkness that didn’t involve bringing death and screaming to herself.</p><p>So Sylvanas looked up, and watched as her murderer and his advisor approached, and the shambling corpses and harrowed ghosts of their army parted for them. She took in the shape of the man who had ended her and began her again, of the jagged blade on his back. She remembered it. She remembered dying. The cold steel lodging itself in her ribs, serating warm, spent flesh. She had fought so hard, and for so long. She had defied him.</p><p>And she had made him so, so very angry.</p><p>At least she would have that.</p><p>And in another of today’s revelations, Sylvanas realized that her ghastly visage had pulled itself into something other than a draw out scream of pain. She was...smiling. Smiling at the memory of that cur’s hatred for her, and how she made him suffer and strive before he ended her and everything she loved. </p><p>But they were getting close to her. There was no time to relish it. No time to realize that this was the first time she’d felt anything but pain and fear and nothingness. That she still could. Feel. Move. Resist. </p><p>That she didn’t want to stop.</p><p>But they would only torture her, or stop whatever this was that was allowing her these little freedoms, precious though they were. She had to hide it. She had to wait. </p><p>Because Sylvanas was the Ranger General, once. Because she knew her tactics. She’d died fighting a guerilla war, striking when she could do the most damage, then fleeing again to the safety of the trees. She could do it again, in this life after death, this mockery of her existence.</p><p>She could make it her own, though.</p><p>So Sylvanas ducked her head back down before they reached her. She willed her spectral features into a mask of passive distress. She willed it. </p><p>“Your faith in the Lich King would put many paladins to shame in their devotion to the Light, lich,” Arthas spat, mere feet from her as a crowd of ghouls shuffled out of the way of his boots, crawling like animals in the decaying bodies of men.</p><p>Sylvanas wondered too, if they moved out of the way because the Lich King puppeted them, or if they did it out of instinct, preserving themselves, even if they lived no more.</p><p>She wondered if they too, realized how revolting they were now. If they too, were disgusted by themselves and everything around them, by the blood that was still drying on the bony claws that their hands had become.</p><p>But then, the freedom of involuntary movement betrayed her. Sylvanas flicked her wrist again. </p><p>Terror greeted her in a new way. Not as before, at the sheer horrific nature of her existence. At the memories of her own people, torn apart by the undead hordes as she helped, elven faces caught in a scream as her dark magic struck them down, then stuck forever that way as Arthas and his necromancers raised them into banshees like her. </p><p>No, it was the same terror of that instinct from before. An internal shriek within her mind, begging for self-preservation. Begging for control. Further control. Ultimate, final control.</p><p>After all, she wasn’t finished yet. Not while that monster still walked the world. Not until she’d sent him to hell herself.</p><p>But neither Arthas nor his lich noticed her. Nor did the pile of wretched, stinking ghouls. </p><p>“Faith, Prince Arthas, is perhaps a poor choice of words. Faith implies choice,” Kel’thuzad explained as they walked away, fading into the cluster of death that they had wrought and rendered, made unliving again to serve with them. “We are bound to the Lich King’s will. We must do what he commands. And now, he commands that we wait. So that is what we will do.”</p><p>Sylvanas looked up again, watching them as they left her behind. Like some broken plaything. A doll missing limbs or eyes.</p><p>But she had just gained so much. In one little movement. She repeated it yet again, savoring the ghost of a feeling that came with it, even if the relief of tensed flesh did not. She still had her will. She could still defy. She could still have some purpose in this world, and one that she divined, not some omnipotent slaver of monsters.</p><p>She would kill Arthas.</p><p>But for that purpose, she too, would wait.</p>
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